returning an array of beans (or: why i'm going insane)

[Marc Esher]

Hi all,
  I've been struggling with this for quite some time now, and it's time to
post as I am about to go insane. Note that I posted this problem to the
comp.lang.programmer group before receiving my subscription activation for
this list. Here goes:

I have a class that returns an array of javabeans (ArticleBean). I want to
expose this class as a web service using Axis. So far, I've been successful
publishing/consuming simple web services, but I've had no success with
anything that returns beans...even the provided sample won't work for me.

Here's the relevant axis code from the web service client:
String endpoint =
    "http://localhost:8080/ArticleSearchService/services/ArticleSearchImpl";;
   Service service = new Service();
   Call call=null;

    call = (Call) service.createCall();
    call.setTargetEndpointAddress( new java.net.URL(endpoint) );
 QName qn = new QName( "urn:ArticleBean", "ArticleBean" );
         call.registerTypeMapping(ArticleBean.class, qn,
                      new
org.apache.axis.encoding.ser.BeanSerializerFactory(ArticleBean.class, qn),
                      new
org.apache.axis.encoding.ser.BeanDeserializerFactory(ArticleBean.class,
qn));
   call.setOperationName( new QName("ArticleSearchImpl", "searchByDoi") );
            call.addParameter("doi", XMLType.XSD_STRING, ParameterMode.IN);
   call.setReturnType( XMLType.SOAP_ARRAY );
   ab = (ArticleBean[]) call.invoke( new Object [] {doi});

And here's the deployment descriptor:

<deployment xmlns="http://xml.apache.org/axis/wsdd/";
xmlns:java="http://xml.apache.org/axis/wsdd/providers/java";>
    <service name="ArticleSearchImpl" provider="java:RPC">
        <parameter name="className" value="ArticleSearchImpl"/>
        <parameter name="allowedMethods" value="*"/>
        <beanMapping qName="myNS:ArticleBean" xmlns:myNS="urn:ArticleBean"
languageSpecificType="java:ArticleBean"/>
    </service>
</deployment>

If I view the wsdl at
http://localhost:8080/ArticleSearchService/services/ArticleSearchImpl?wsdl,
I get the following error: (snip) The value of the attribute "xmlns:tns1" is
invalid. Prefixed namespace bindings may not be empty

If I invoke a the client class (snippet above), I get "no deserializer
defined for array type" in the error message.

So.....I tried another approach:

put my ArticleSearchImpl class into a package (ArticleSearch).
use java2wsdl on this class; then, use wsdl2java, putting the auto-generated
files into package ArticleSearch.ws.  This worked well.  however, it also
put a new version of my ArticleBean class into this package as well, and the
deploy.wsdd points to this bean.  Then, I use the auto-generated
ArticleSearchImplSoapBindingImpl to wrap my original class, something like
this:

import ArticleSearch.ArticleSearchImpl;
public class ArticleSearchImplSoapBindingImpl implements
ArticleSearch.ws.ArticleSearchImpl
{
    ArticleSearchImpl searcher = new ArticleSearchImpl(); //my original
class

    public ArticleSearch.ws.ArticleBean[] searchByAuthor(java.lang.String
author) throws java.rmi.RemoteException {
        return searcher.searchByAuthor(author);
    }
....
}

The problem is that my original class returns an array of
ArticleSearch.ArticleBean, not an array of ArticleSearch.ws.ArticleBean.
Sticking (ArticleSearch.ws.ArticleBean[]) in front of the return value
didn't help, either, as I suspected it wouldn't. So now I've progressed
somewhat from my original problem, but i'm still stuck. I cannot believe
that it's all that difficult to create this sucker, so I know I'm doing
stupid things wrong.

Since there is no documentation on the axis site for returning an array of
beans, I'm appealing to you all for help.

Thanks.

Marc